Social and Demographic Characteristics of Rural Families in the Municipalities Of Armenia, Circasia, Filandia, La Tebaida, Montenegro and Quimbaya in the Department of Quindio, Colombia

Abstract

This article is part of the "Family and Gender" research line of the Regional Studies Research Group within the Social Work Program of the Faculty of Humanities and Fine Arts. Epistemologically, it is based on the constructionist perspective and from there, a reading and analysis of the configuration, family organization and the dynamics of families was made based on the studies carried out by Gutiérrez de Pineda (1987),  Puyana (2004) and Jelin (2020).

The purpose of this article is to characterize the social and demographic aspects of rural families in the municipalities of Armenia, Circasia, Filandia, La Tebaida, Montenegro, and Quimbaya in the department of Quindío, Colombia. These families were studied from the perspective of Social Constructionism theory and its contributions to the field of family studies, seeking to interpret family discourse (Gabrium & Holstein, 1993, cited by Iturrieta, 2001), in such a way that, as knowledge is constituted in interaction mediated by language, it offers a wide variety of ways of understanding the world,  which are embedded in ways of life based on specific values ​​and customs (Pinilla, 2021). Hence, this theory values ​​and focuses its interest on knowledge produced from within groups, one of which is families.

This knowledge perspective served to establish a partnership with the mixed ethnographic design (Creswell, 2013 and Madison, 2011; Sampieri, et al. 2014, p. 485), in which the information collected through interviews was analyzed, identifying the social and demographic profile of families in rural and urban contexts of the Quindío territory. The main findings show that the correlation between income, education, and housing tenure by age group reflects an economic and educational cycle with a greater concentration in the 26–35 age group, suggesting a stage of economic and social consolidation linked to entry into the formal labor market, which stabilizes in middle adulthood with shared household leadership,  the predominance of the nuclear family, and a decrease in the number of children, whose care and protection prevails among the participating women.